Harvey Guillén says Guillermo is taking matters into his own hands when What We Do in the Shadows returns for Season 5.
Harvey Guillén’s Guillermo has had enough. After more than a decade of luring unsuspecting virgins to their doom, disposing of dead bodies, and waiting for his master, Nandor (Kayvan Novak), to turn him into a vampire, the familiar-turned-vampire hunter is taking matters into his own hands. Instead of waiting for Nandor to honor his promise to turn him into a blood-sucking child of the night, Guillermo plans to leave the manor in search of another vampire to do the deed. This fork in the road is where we find Guillermo at the end of the fourth season of What We Do in the Shadows. When Season 5 begins on July 13, could a new vamp be in town?
“We pick up right where we left off,” Guillén told Entertainment Weekly as part of his 2023 Pride cover interview. “Guillermo is done waiting for his turn. Guillermo is taking matters into his own hands. And Guillermo is taking no prisoners. It’s just like, ‘We’re done.’ The clock is ticking.”
How can the clock tick for a vampire, you ask? They’re eternal, after all. Unfortunately for Guillermo, he’s not getting any younger. As years pass, the familiar earns more wrinkles, back problems, and missed opportunities to enjoy the perks of being undead and loving it. This aggression will not stand. It’s time for Guillermo to get what he’s owed.
“The whole idea of becoming a vampire is becoming a vampire at a young age, where you’re still youthful,” he explains. “I mean, look at the familiars who were never made to vampires in the past seasons — it’s kind of disappointing. We had [Jack O’Connell’s] Benjy, who was like 86 and saying ‘He’s going to make me a vampire anytime soon…’ Guillermo is like, ‘I don’t want that.’”
Guillén explains why Guillermo feels so much pressure about his situation, saying his character doesn’t want his eternity to be plagued by regrets. It comes down to a simple choice. “Get busy living or get busy dying,” to borrow a phrase from Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding of The Shawshank Redemption. Like Lewis Carroll once said, “In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take, relationships we were afraid to have and the decidions we waited too long to make.”
“We’re always trying to please a person who’s not satisfied with who we are,” says Guillén about remaining true to oneself. “But we have no one to please but ourselves. And when you realize that all that matters is that you’re happy with who you are when you look in the mirror, then everyone else can go F off.”
Damn right.